Whilst out sightseeing my partner took a photograph of Sayed shielding his eyes from the sun. It was a snapshot that spoke of the weathers mood and evidence of the leisurely pursuits of the day. Upon seeing the portrait – on the back of the camera – we both knew that this was an image we could use. The problem was, the image wasn’t ours. We didn’t make it, or own the copyright. To solve the dilemma we decided to negotiate a price with the author in order to obtain full rights of the image.

We settled on the sum of ten pounds.

In acquiring the digital file we set about making it our own. The narrative of the work is a deliberately self–conscious tale of how we took the opportunity to appropriate an image for the purpose of the sunscreen project.

Rolling the ten pound sheet over the image sees it being eclipsed by the transaction.

Karl Ohiri and Sayed Sattar Hasan are two British born artists who work collaboratively and independently. Their practices are centred on everyday life experience, which they regard as the centre of their artistic process.

Fashion is the easiest and most conspicuous way to mark the political affiliations of the wearer

For Sunscreen Judge has created an animated gif featuring the 18 haircuts supposedly allowed for women in North Korea. Judge has developed an interest in the bizarre cultural practices and civil restrictions supposedly in play within North Korea’s borders and predominantly reported to us by the tabloid press. Women can choose from 18 styles, Men can choose from 10.

His most recent performance project; Do What Thou Wilt, was inspired by Norwegian Death Metal and early wax cylinder recordings of infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley and was commissioned by The Spill Festival and performed at The Barbican, London. From 2009-11 he toured his multi media performance installation The Modes of Al-Ikseer nationally and to critical acclaim. The performance involved creating a liquid floor using 2.5 tons of pasteurized milk upon which a performance, live music, and laser projected abstract animations unfolded.

In 2012 his solo exhibition ‘In this strange house…’ was commissioned and shown at the New Art Gallery, Walsall. From Jan-Aug 2013 Judge was artist in residence at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, supported by Meadow Arts where he created a short film based on two sites impacted upon by the late Lord Curzon, namely Coronation Park in New Delhi and Kedleston Hall.

Judge was the winner of the 2011 Arts Foundation Fellowship Award in Performance and Live Art.

Avant Garde or Last Minute expands on a style of language absorbed from the hundreds of found commercial slogans and media texts gathered for an ongoing project under the title 723 Variations on the Same Theme (2014 – 15). While the phrase in this particular screen-saver is invented rather than found, it is designed to be as ambiguous as possible, leaving its intentions difficult to decipher. It might be a kind of auto-criticism, pre-empting a common public response to contemporary art, or perhaps a jibe at neo-avant-garde obsessions with cultural end-games and notions of utility and relevance. The background, selected for its resemblance to a generic abstract or experimental photogram, perhaps from the 1920s, is an image made by chance, a piece of light-sensitive commercial photographic paper marked by random accidents of storage – and here digitally scanned.

Wayne Burrows lives in Nottingham and works mainly as a writer. Burrows exhibited at QUAD as part of the group exhibitions ‘Event Horizon’ in 2013 and ‘Beyond’ in 2014. Recent publications include Spirit Wrappings: Some Notes on the Rashleigh Jackson Family Collection (2012), Marine: A Story in Eight Objects (2013), The Holcombe Tarot (2014), Black Glass (2015) and Exotica Suite (2015). He also makes collage films, among them Disturbances (2010), The Serendipity Loops (2012) and Subliminal (2015). Since 2010 he has created an body of work and several fabricated retrospective exhibitions under the entirely fictional identity of British artist Robert Holcombe (b.1923 – d.2003). He is currently based at Primary in Nottingham, UK.

Anna Barham’s screensaver starts with a result of a google image search for the word “leisure”. The search term has then been progressively entered into the lines of letters and symbols making up the image’s digital structure causing the image to spasmodically shift place and colour as it complicates itself line by line. The work addresses several connections between text and image in a digital world, not only between a search term and its results – a one way correspondence which yields an image at once to vague and too specific to be able to work reliably in the other way round – but also between image as text (code) and the effect of natural language on that code. The word has a gestural impact on the image both as it is inserted into it, changing its appearance, but also in combination with it – as title/description – producing a particular nuance or sense. Language itself is approached here, and in Barham’s practice more broadly, as a technology to be hacked, to harness the capacity of word combinations and slippages to affect the imagination and create possible worlds.

Anna Barham works with video, writing and live events. She lives and works in London. Anna was commissioned by Beacon Art Project to produce a work for ‘Profusion’ one of 10 artists exhibited at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire a National Trust property in 2010.

Clare Charnley’s work is often dialogic and includes strangers. Interested in language as a site of critical play, she is curious to see what shifts as objects, words and intentions move between places. She also works with Brazilian artist, Patricia Azevedo with whom she generates a series of encounters, games and stories to do with the act of communication itself. Venues include The Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool: Belfast Exposed Gallery, Belfast: PSL Project Space Leeds: Johalla Gallery, Chicago: Binaural, Portugal: PNEM Sound Art Festival, Netherlands: Platforma, London: Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico and NYLO, Living Art Museum, Reykjavik.

Clare lives in Leeds and is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University. Clare was commissioned by Beacon Art Project to re-stage an earlier performance of hers for ‘Seen Created’ at the Terry O’Toole Theatre, Lincoln in 2013.

Since 2012, Scott has sonically-documented selected exhibitions in public galleries and artist-run spaces around the UK. These recordings are then mixed and conflated in live DJ performances, and within installations accompanied by commissioned fictional writings in response to the recordings by other artists, writers and curators.

The work explores the concept of machinic silence, and in particular, the sonic relationship between objects, architecture and the environment. Machinic silence is a pre/post-human condition which also facilitates a de-centring of subjectivity. In addition, the sonic documentation of exhibitions, combined with the remix format, catalyses exhibitions to become objects that are curatable.

For the sunscreen commission, Scott has developed a micro-edit in which half-a-second curated-fragments of exhibitions he has documented are concatenated, rather than conflated. The mixes that he produces are normally over an hour long, but this micro-edit seems to reflect the engagement in the biennial context, and suggests a form where the regional can become local.
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Scott Mason
b. Bedford UK, Lives and works Rutland, UK and was selected as a B.mentored artist as part of Beacon’s B.professional programme presenting his work at a B.talking event in January 2015.

Solo exhibitions include: of a final account in formation, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2014), and as far as a place, espacio f, Madrid (2013). Performances: the shadow buried deep by that alternative, The Barbican, London (2013) and Floor Plan for an Institution, for Grand Union at the Meter Room, Coventry (2013).

He was a Flat Time House MFI Graduate Award winner (supported by the John Latham Foundation) in 2011, and currently a CCW Graduate Fellow at the University of the Arts, London. He is currently studying for a Masters in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.

This rotating image is from the back page of a tobacconist’s encyclopaedia from 1912. It is from an era when smoking was marketed as a sophisticated and fun pastime, at least according to the records of advertising posters within the book from that year. Saving it from a skip I kept it to possibly use at a later date or just to hang from a couple of nails on my bedroom wall. I’ve been trying to quit smoking myself on and off over the past couple years. Now I feel I need a cigarette when I’m working or stressed, yet I also feel I have to have a cigarette when relaxing or enjoying myself. It has become an essential act in both work and leisure.

Alex Pain currently has a studio at One Thoresby Street, lives in Nottingham, UK and graduated from BA Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University (2011). The same year he was awarded a Solo Show prize at the Castle Open and exhibited ERRATICS at Nottingham Castle in 2012. Other solo exhibitions include Cut Across The Grain, CUSP, 2012. Group shows include Europa-Hungary-Balaton, Hungary, 2011 and Sculpturing, Two Queens, 2013. His sculpture Tor was selected for an acquisition by Arts Council England in 2014.

In the morning, I notice how Weetabix is described using four words: Whole Wheat Cereal Biscuits. I sit looking at the Andrex packaging and consider the term Quilts as a way of defining the texture and feel of the loo roll. In the shower, through the heavy droplets, I can see the back of the shampoo bottle. The lines of the bar code continue as strands of hair.

At lunch, at the same moment as the drop-in meditation session begins, so does the construction work outside.

Staycation Island is created from found images and borrowed 3D forms, modeled by Google SketchUp users. Freddy Tuppen’s virtual desert island, compiled from images in the public domain, acts as the platform for an extruded still of a popular fish tank screensaver.

Referencing its moving counterpart’s ability to transform the computer screen into a living environment, Staycation Island represents an artificial and uninhabitable world, a closed ecosystem. The camera pans from left to right, reminiscent of the camera movement commonly used in early side-scrolling video games, a viewpoint associated with detachment and exteriority.

The ‘staycation’, popularised by the economic crash of 2008 and the consequences of diminishing disposable income, is the practice of engaging in leisure activities at, or within driving distance of the home. Rather than travelling to foreign countries in search of beach resorts or city breaks, the staycationer seeks gratification from nearby comforts. By relating the notion of the staycation to the screensaver, Tuppen questions the capacity for the screensaver, often a photographic representation of a dreamt-of elsewhere, photoshopped to a high level of artifice, to satisfy the necessity for escape from daily routine.

Freddy Tuppen’s work examines how externalisations of memory such as photography and cinema affect our experience of architectural space. In doing so he explores how the fallibility of human memory can become an agent for the imagination. Tuppen’s recent practice focuses on how our personal experiences of geography and travel are increasingly fragmented by the mass consumption of images. By creating hybrid environments, both physical installations and virtual animations, he explores how travel shows, glossy supplements and online advertising manipulate our experience.

Tuppen (b.1986) is an artist living and working in London. Tuppen is currently working on a residency, summer school and exchange between One Thoresby Street and s-t-o-r-e.

Recent exhibitions include Placeholder, Store, London; Cold Sweat, Bill Brady, Miami; Making Holes in Water, Total, Athens. He completed his MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2012 and his undergraduate degree at The Bartlett School of Architecture, where he is currently a tutor. In 2011, Tuppen co-founded STORE, an association of artists and architects, which implements an open programme of events, exhibitions and short courses.

John Lawrence is a London-based artist working across text, object, print and video installation.

In his work he reorganises familiar, recognisable elements in order to offer up new readings and open out meaning.

Mining a contemporary archive of objects, imagery and footage Lawrence works within a common popular language in order to navigate our mediated experience and better understand the way we see ourselves.

Alongside his practice Lawrence organises projects which create new sites for work, collaboration and experimentation to exist.

After/Hours/Drop/Box commissions new work at the intersection of music, video and live performance

…Or maybe it’s the same for everyone is a print platform for artists’ short fiction and experimental writing.

Lawrence studied at the Royal Academy Schools and is currently one of 14 associate artists undertaking the public event and study programme Open School East in De Beauvoir Town, East London. He will be exhibiting a solo exhibition at One Thoresby Street towards the end of 2015 that will tour to Oriel Davies Gallery, Wales.

A data revolution is underway, one that is already reshaping how knowledge is produced, business conducted, and governance enacted, as well as raising many questions concerning surveillance, privacy, security, profiling, social sorting, and intellectual property rights’ – Rob Kitchin.

As technology accelerates it gathers an ever-increasing amount of data from a myriad of devices. Much of this data is provided by users interacting with this technology through programmed interfaces within a constant information stream. With the introduction of smart cities and the Internet of things, the physical web will become ever more present, once inanimate objects evolving into smart devices, becoming nodes in controlled networks. They too will be able to provide information, increasing the deluge of relational data and the possibilities of its usage.

Medical Tech companies are now also able to explore the data in our bodies through DNA. Google Genomics has been launched providing an API to store, process, explore, and share DNA sequence reads, reference-based alignments, and variant calls, using Google’s cloud infrastructure. With this in mind the piece of work (‘Optimise your transformation’) is the scene of a medical room, full of high tech equipment that may represent a multi-way exchange of information from both ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ matter.

Joey Holder was Artist-in-Residence at One Thoresby Street (2014) in association with Near Now. She was a recent finalist for the Converse/Dazed Emerging Artist Award; included in ‘Vestige: The Future is Here’, Design Museum, London and ‘Multinatural Histories’, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013). Last year (2014) she exhibited widely with projects including ‘hypersalon’ at Miami Basel and ‘HYDROZOAN’ a solo exhibition as part of the Liverpool Biennial program at The Royal Standard (with support from Near Now, Nottingham and Arts Council England). This year she was selected for ‘The Multiverse’ residency at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK and presented ‘BioStat.’ a solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, London, UK (2015).

MTN DEW is the first in the series of alternative adverts for well known brands , which riffs on Asbestos’ recent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery’s Cafe Concrete, which was knee deep in colourful internet memes, MLG Parody in-jokes and straight faced YouTube How-Tos.

Over the last five years Bruce Asbestos has experimented with digital and social media, popular culture, marketing and small-scale production. An active internet presence ​was​ at the core of his practice: his online TV show, The Social Media Takeaway, use​d​ the quick-fix, low-brow, throw-away nature of YouTube as a platform to produce artworks and performances.​ ​ Bruce is currently taking a well earned #SOCIALMEDIASABBATICAL to concentrate on a series of artworks.

During Studying Fine Art BA at Nottingham Trent University (2001-04), Bruce completed a five-month scholarship at Musashino University, Tokyo. On the day of leaving Fine Art, Bruce started studying a three-month intensive business course, before going on to set up artist run projects Stand Assembly Studios, Moot Gallery and My House Gallery. During this time he worked in collaboration with Hannah Conroy as Ayling and Conroy. More recently he completed his MA in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, during which he completed a two month scholarship at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia​, and has recently mothballed his gallery, Trade (2010-2014)​

This is just for you, 2015 Edited and looped karaoke video for Donna Summer’s ‘Love To Love You Baby’ (1975).

This is just for you operates as a meme to the distribution of culture through the replication of a fragment of language. This fragment carries with it the lusty desire of Donna Summer’s original song, but only if you are aware of the original song. It is a coded language, coded in the camp of disco.

The looped karaoke video takes you through the lyrics. With each performance of the song, the meaning gets further removed as each performer expresses their own feelings or lusts.

My work explores my subjective relationships and positions and what forms of culture can be exploited to construct an identity. I am aiming to make work that is slippery, gestured and emotional. I have concentrated on exhibition making, as a process of making relationships and ideas public, in many different formats. This can involve production of spatial exhibitions, texts, images, films, programming, objects, and digital spaces. I am looking at how art has become a leisure activity, and the importance of leisure activity (browsing the internet, cooking for people etc.) as a space for cultural and political work. Roles in the production and dissemination of imagery are part of this, in the differences between being a user, owner and author of an image, concept, or form.

Filipinos are among the most in-demand workers in the hotel and restaurant industry. Filipinos in Macau comprise the second largest population after mainland China. Macau continues to boom, overtaking Las Vegas with several new resorts opening in the next few years. This means thousands of job opportunities for Filipino workers. “Macau is also one of the highest-paying cities for hospitality workers, almost doubling what a Filipino receives in the Middle East,” said Paolo Martel, managing director for Ikon Solutions.

Ikon Solutions is a full-service licensed recruitment agency with offices in Manila, Cebu, Macau and Hong Kong. It specializes in recruiting personnel from all corners of the Philippines. Recently, The Venetian, Macau’s largest casino has just appointed its 500th Filipino employee. A special presentation marked the occasion.

“The very warm reception of Sembrano as the Venetian’s 500th employee speaks volumes about how the management appreciates the excellent work that she and other Filipinos like her provide to the hotel,” said Martel of Ikon, which recruited Sembrano for the hotel.

Ikon helps Filipino job seekers and employers through various online channels and initiatives. Ikon has removed the middlemen or broker system, which in the past has led to workers being exploited. Applicants through Ikon are guaranteed that they will never have to pay exorbitant fees to find the right jobs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBjxa3bWiqk

Pio Abad (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines) lives and works in London. He recently took part in The Talks at One Thoresby Street (2014).

Recent solo exhibitions include: A Short History of Decay, Silverlens, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2015); Some Are Smarter Than Others, Gasworks, London (2014); The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders, Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Manila (2014); Every Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right, Silverlens Gallery, Manila (2013) and For Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013). His group exhibitions include: Pre-pop to Post-human: Collage in the Digital Age, A Hayward Touring Exhibition (2014); Market Forces: The Friction of Opposites, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong (2013); A Conspiracy of Detail, Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow (2013); Glasgow International 2012 and London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2012).

Popova’s work negotiates the physical, economical and political articulations of painting today as well as materiality and the value of art objects. Dwelling on the difference between creative workers (cognitariat) and workers that use their hands, Popova examines the production of surplus value and how this can be defined, particularly in a time of digitalization.

Painterly gestures of the window cleaner drawing and redrawing the infinity symbol on the screen rub the difference between labour and leisure, productive time online and the time wasted.

Yelena Popova (b. 1978, Urals, Russia) lives in Nottingham and works at Primary studios. Yelena graduated from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2011. In 2014 Yelena was shortlisted for Arts Foundation Award in Painting. Yelena’s work is part of 100 Painters of Tomorrow publication by Themes and Hudson.

‘The Take a Break Pug’ (2015) is a looped, three second screensaver in which a garish message repeatedly advises the user to ‘Take a Break’, whilst zooming in to the sleepy eyes of a pug dog. The work is an attempt to mimic both the repetitious nature and sentimental use of animals in online memes. A ‘break’ might refer to a few moments away from the computer, a holiday, a dream, or simply walking the dog. With so much art vying for attention at the Venice Biennale, and so much work put into the production of the event, the ‘Take a Break Pug’ is intended to offer both workers and those at leisure temporary respite from the pressures of art tourism.

Simon Raven lives and works in Nottingham. He holds a studio at Primary and uses performance and other media. He currently teaches on the Foundation Course for the International School at Nottingham Trent University.

Partially camouflaged, the words “welcome to hell” endlessly flash on the screen.

Welcome to hell. It’s a reminder more than an invitation – welcome to hell. It’s a reminder that you stopped scrolling, you’re momentarily offline. Imagine the whole world on fire. Extinction of mankind. Time crumbles away. Foundations crumble away. Welcome to Hell. What were you looking for anyway, it’s 2am, or midday, or it doesn’t really matter. You can’t concentrate. Welcome to hell.

Foundations erode away. It’s giving you a headache. Imagine the whole world on fire. You quickly touch your track-pad and it disappears. Head throbbing, you decide to continue the search, worsening your posture, slouching lower, losing your way. Then, you make a tiny purchase, a day’s worth or a night’s, whatever. When infinitely skimming the surface there are no new breakthroughs, just desire and boredom, endlessly looping like that .gif.

Jake Kent is an artist currently living and working in Nottingham, he holds a studio at Backlit and co-directs Triple O.G. – a shop, publisher and gallery also currently housed at Backlit. He is currently studying at The School of the Damned; a free, student run, unofficial Fine Art course initiated as a direct response to the problems of the current higher education system. He explores the contemporary fascination with the reuse and regurgitation of culture and its role in the production of Capital. The work deals with cynicism, apathy and emotion in the neo-liberal age. Through questioning the authenticity and effect of the subcultures, particularly those he is immersed in, he attempts to offer a wider social/ political critique from this context.

Don’t Take Your Eye Off The Ball focuses on the ridiculousness and overt sexualisation of sports coverage following from Rowley’s recent interest in sporting activities and their impact on the perception of masculinity. Thinking about thinly veiled references and marketing shots; the decadence of the slow motion and vivid colour are revealed all hall marks of a commercial. There is a strange campness that seems out of place within a brash, hyper masculine event of a football match.

Joe Rowley graduated from Nottingham Trent University (2014), Rowley combines his art practice with the co-management of HUTT Gallery, based at Primary in Nottingham. Rowley also holds at studio at Backlit, Nottingham.

Presenting ideas as a humorous or satirical assemblage of objects, moving images and performance, Rowley explores the slippages and strange rituals born out of half remembered situations and exaggerated emotions.

Shimmering sinking is built from a series of digital visual components that Nicolson habitually combines to create large scale screen prints. These ‘tiles’ are digital templates that correlate to ‘silk-screens’ in the artist’s studio. Nicolson uses these templates to mock up and test out compositions, with the digital works existing as virtual sketches or designs. The black and white lines are derived from photographs of rippled stripy fabric and allude to surface and depth. Shimmering Sinking attempts to playfully recall the atmosphere of Venice as a beautiful and sinister myth. Sun glistening on shifting waterways; Canaletto’s recurring motif of waves; the stink of flooded streets.

Fay Nicolson (b Derby 1984) holds an MA from the Royal College of Art (2011) and a BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London (2006). Nicolson recently collaborated with Candice Jacobs on Accidentally on Purpose, an exhibition, online project and series of soundtracks for QUAD, Derby; and exhibited in Sleeping Upright, an online project by Jacobs and exhibition at One Thoresby Street.

I’m exploring being watched, watching and watching back. How one can speak about something macro with something micro. Playing a reality/non-reality based game within an actual truth.

The aspiration of the game vs. your aspiration in life?

The physical exchange of paper money becomes sincere within the domestic setting, whilst at play. Each metal pawn being reflective of concealed self.

Making an exchange, playing dirty. A literal representation of construct in a living room, in a home.

Dinah Gold graduated from Nottingham Trent University (2014) and was recently selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2014). She is currently based between Nottingham and London specialising in moving image that relates to surveillance and voyeurism. These notions are realised through experimental documentaries/ portraits. She is interested in speaking about human behaviours; she makes sense of this by making the personal, impersonal, using her environment and family as a vehicle to explore these concerns.

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Watermelon explores the complexities of a society that both embraces and misunderstands cultures. We can buy Buddha sculptures in the supermarket and dream catchers at craft stalls and then hang them together. The dialogue is one of hybridizing culture to create a surreal esoteric group. Consumerism informs how “culture” is available to buy as a mass marketed product, which can be appealing without any notion of the origins of the objects and actions. Is this what society needs to integrate these ideals into our systems or are we just mindlessly absorbing?

Bright colours flashing lights, uniformity and cyclicity are both appealing and a raw part of the roots of cultural practices around the world. In terms of ritual Victor Turners discuesses how uniformity can inform a ritual process where the ritual initiands are “shorn of all identity” in order to make them disassociated with anything that was before and anything that is to come. In contemporary society being removed from the cultural tags of class and gender become important in trying to liberate us from capitalist tendency to swallow up equality in exchange for feeding the system. The collective is represented by large capitalist companies not those that feed the spirit. The individual has taken over; I propose that there should be a takeover of the unbranded collective exploring a group mindset of spirituality not feeding their own personal wants and needs of a system ruled by money and class.

Oppositions play out within the work which mocks the hybridized mindless ritual and being deeply mystified by the surreal esoteric. An aesthetic of absurdity plays out in order to alienate the viewer from class , gender, race and consumerism.

We live in a world where Pastafarianism is accepted by the authorities as a religion, yet laughed at by the masses. If the object of worship was something more mysterious would it be taken seriously? Lo fi, and abstract materials are both fetishized and dramatized to give them a seeming value, it is then up to the audience to question whether they should be valuable or ridiculous.

Abi hubbard is a Nottingham based artist having graduated from BA Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University (2014) she also held a studio at One Thoresby Street. Predominantly focusing on a performative practice. Utilizing sculpture and the human body as “stage” Hubard creates a space for explorations of primal instances of culture where Ritual is prominent.

Blue Curry (b.1974, Nassau) is a London based artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation. Using an idiosyncratic language of found materials he engages with themes of exoticism, tourism and cultural commodification. The formal elegance of his works is often at odds with the commonplace objects and unsophisticated techniques used to create them. Disrupting the mythic components of clichéd fantasies, he takes viewers to a seductively familiar destination but denies them the simple consumption they desire.

Blue obtained an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and has shown extensively. He participated in the Liverpool, SITE Santa Fe and Jamaica Biennials, as well as in group shows at P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, The Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC, the Fondation Clément, Martinique and the V&A Museum, London. In 2011 he had his first institutional solo show at the Nassauischer Kunstverein (NKV), Germany and was recently selected for the Studio Voltaire Open exhibition curated by Cory Archangel and Hanne Mugaas.

Recce returns to view the site of the film location for Alia Pathan’s recent film Marine Spirit Attack Reprise, 2014, that explores ideas of the sea as a site for memory storage in the digital now.

The site is free from the pollution of neighboring shipping and cruise industries, making it both an ideal leisure resort and film location. Pathan considers how such places will be catalogued, archived and remembered, as data storage becomes more comprehensive, codified and arbitrarily less tactile.

Pathan’s ongoing practice is influenced by the technological commodification of memory, particularly the production processes needed to enable data storage and its imminent ecological impacts.

“As file sizes become increasingly smaller we are able to capture more detail and data. Present day technology enables us to measure in pico-seconds, yet we cannot subjectively experience a pico-second; we only experience a sense of duration in the smallest unit of time it takes us to notice a moment has passed.”

Alia Pathan is an artist based in London. She is an Alumni member of One Thoresby Street and graduated from Nottingham Trent University Fine Art BA in 2009. Her works concern the relationship between technology and human perception and how we communicate the scale of this through language.

The Ubiquitous One is a collage appropriated from found material and family archives. Referencing China’s revolutionary opera, popularized during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the assembled image subverts the singular vision of revolutionary struggles. The narrative takes its cue from a peasant, surprised both by the view of tourists playing golf on the terraced rice fields along with the cohort of a singular phenomenon.

Dinu Li is a British based multi-discipline artist working across time-based media, installation, found objects and performance.

Throughout his practice, Li places himself in a variety of circumstances, responding to his immediate surroundings in an attempt to understand the many cultures he encounters. Li’s output offers a visceral reaction to the world around us within the context of the times we live in. He explores the nuances of the everyday – its many rituals, routines and patterns, in relation to local and global concerns. Recent works have been situated between modes of representation, the vernacular, specific geographic and historical contexts and the intersection between the personal and the political.

Li’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including: the 53rd Venice Biennale; the 3rd Bucharest Biennale; Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Germany; Alternative Space Loop, Seoul, Korea; Danielle Arnaud, London; Chalk Horse, Sydney through Para/Site Hong Kong; Petra Rietz Salon, Berlin; SVA, New York through Artprojx; Rivington Place, London; White Space 798, Beijing and Christian Roellin, Zurich. He has undertaken residencies with OCAT in Shenzhen, China; ArtSway Production Residency in Hampshire and Chengdu, China; and a Cornerhouse and Space Artists Exchange Residency in Central Asia. He has been a guest speaker for Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Museum and is a visiting lecturer across educational institutions in the UK and abroad.

Breeze explores connectivity, influence and how we are capable of functioning within the complex systems, whilst still having the room to excerpt a sense of individual expression. Breeze is a looped two second excerpt from a longer piece of footage that observes the shadow of a fence dancing in the breeze and the afternoon sun light.

Liam Aiken makes site specific works, paintings and objects that experiment in colour, geometric pattern and the act of seeing. Works are often made in response to autobiographical experiences, points in history, landscape, iconic architecture and natural phenomena.

Having graduated from Nottingham Trent University Fine Art course (2007) Liam Aiken is currently based at Primary studios in Nottingham. He has exhibited throughout the UK as an artist and with collective Tether. His first solo exhibition was held at Syson in March 2014. He is currently exhibiting Tempered at Loughborough University Arts until September 2015.

Barcode Entry attempts to share a personal and emotional journey, through the written word. The proposition is a challenge an invitation for the audience to connect with the concept of leisure or “down” time via a collection of poetry and prose produced from a series of conversations over the last year.

The written word is often used in a utilitarian manner – to explain, quantify or qualify. The rest of our time spent using language is an attempt to achieve an emotional communication with the world and create relationships with individuals. Today, we often do this via technology i.e. from my iphone.

The notion of reading as a means of using up our leisure time is also something which is on the decline, with visual media becoming more “relevant” to the modern-day recipient. But yet, the written word is dependent on its visual construct in order to communicate.

Sooree Pillay is part of the New Art Exchanges’ ExperiMentor artist development programme and current Artistic Director of YARD theatre, also based at the New Art Exchange. Her latest project, Get Up Stand Up (April to September 2015) , is a site specific audio/visual installation at the Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, exploring global civil rights and its relevance to today’s contemporary youth and communities.

The screensaver can be thought of as the screen in a relaxed leisure mode, basking in a fallow period before the exertions of the next spreadsheet or online search. But, quite to the contrary, the energy needed to generate the screensaver is as great as that needed when the screen is in full productive labour. Behind the errant doodles of the screensaver lie the urgent anxieties of the generation of power and the consumption of resource. Within the infosphere there is no leisure without power, no fallow period of regeneration.

Frank Abbott makes light based installations, hand held video performances and films. He has been active as a film-maker and artist since the 1970’s.

Abbot is a founding member and artist based at Primary, an artist led studio where the New Art Exchange is a corporate board member. Frank Abbot frequently delivers workshops and talks at the New Art Exchange as a resident artist.

After working as part of the London based music and performance collective, The Scratch Orchestra, he went on to make the On the Air Trilogy, a series of experimental films for British television exploring the nature of the broadcasting experience and ran the New Cinema Workshop at the Midland Group in Nottingham.

From 1989 he taught fine art and film at Nottingham Trent University. Performing with the Trampoline organization and Moon Radio he developed a performance practice alongside the use of live streaming. In the role of media activist and artist he enacted a decade long series of short performative interventions in a wide range of cultural contexts, Five Slides and a Song 1998-2008, which combined technology and humour to reflect on the nature of our personal relationship with the emerging media culture. He performed extensively in Nottingham and also in Berlin and Tokyo.

Having emerged from teaching in 2010 he is now based at Primary, an artists studio in an old school building in Nottingham. From there he has created performances for HATCH including Spaghetti Powerpoint based on the re showing of a Spaghetti Western. His SNSM –the Remix , is a re-presentation of the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

A collaborative project with the painter Duncan Higgins, using ten years of mobile phone video dialogue, has evolved into Muscle, a sculptural installation, the first iteration of which was shown at the House of World Cultures in Berlin in 2010.

In 2012 his signage piece, You Do Something To Me, won the Nottingham Castle and Museum Open Exhibition Award and he was awarded the commission to create Processing in the grand stairwell of Nottingham Castle in 2013.

A collaborative project he initiated between Primary studio artists and Wysing Studios, Cambridge resulted in Expanded Studio Project, for which he created the computer driven performance YAW HALF with the artist Rob Smith.

He has run workshops on collaborative practice at the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India and a range of activities and workshops in the UK.

‘The Gaze” depicts the pacific island historically known as Formosa (beautiful island), Tayouan (Grand Bay) and now called Taiwan. The drawing mimics the shape of an eye gazing into the sky, filled with the country’s native betel palm (Areca catechu).

Modern satellite imagery provide us with maps, give directions during travel and allow us to visit places without leaving the comfort of our sofas, no matter what type of maps or devices we use to explore, the idea of the shape of a place has been systemized and we look at it by an organized and prescribed perspective. The style of map depicted in The Gaze has been drawn in 80 CW, a similar style to the earliest maps of Taiwan that were hand drawn by Portuguese and Spanish explorers in the 15th century.

The gaze is one of Lee’s Final 66 Drawings, a series of works set to count down to the end of her drawing based works.

Feng-Ru Lee is a Taiwanese Artist currently living and working in Nottingham. Her practice addresses issues of cross cultural experiences and geographical migrations, she has a keen interest in the juxtaposition of eastern and western cultures and systems. Lee works across a range of medias often using installation, participatory performance and video.

Feng Ru Lee is part of the New Art Exchange’s ExperiMentor artist development programme and will be exhibiting the solo exhibition ‘Journey to Citizen Sheep’ in July/August 2015.

Lee has exhibited throughout the UK, Taiwan and internationally including the USA, Middle East, Japan, and across Europe. She was the winner of the prestigious Taipei Prize in 2000. Lee has undertaken residencies in Berlin, Jerusalem and the New Art Gallery Walsall. Recent exhibitions have included: Flux Fest at VIVID, JAM at South Hills Park Art Center, Beyond as part of the Supernatural season at QUAD, Derby and a joint Solo Exhibition at Entrance Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic.

Henry/Bragg delve into the nuances, rituals, habits and practices of declining and appropriated working class culture. They capture snapshots of social phenomena, taking the familiar and displacing it in order to present it back to the viewer as a mirror to themselves.

Their latest photographic series B.I.N.G.O is about the changing face of bingo and was launched at the London Art Fair 2015 and will be a solo show at the C&C Gallery 23 May to 28 June 2015.

Bingo had humble beginnings as a social activity, mainly for women, in church halls and working men’s clubs. Following The Betting and Gaming Act 1960, which allowed the dominance of large commercial bingo chains, the game rapidly increased in popularity and dedicated bingo halls began to spring up all over the country. It eventually went on to become a multi billion pound industry.

In the last decade, bingo has been in decline and these huge venues have proved difficult to fill. Online bingo is the industry’s growth market, which now allows for 24/7 play.

One result of the commodification of bingo is that is has moved participants to create a non-mainstream culture of DIY self-organised games in community centres and non-traditional bingo environments. For people whose pleasure it is to play in the company of others, not just the hope of a quick win, bingo is moving back to its roots.

Henry/Bragg’s first collaboration Going Down 1998, a film installation about football fandom, was shown at International Centre of Photography, New York and has recently been acquired by The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago for their permanent collection. Their first solo exhibition was Talent Show at the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery in 2000. Dyed in the Wool was a solo show at the Millais Gallery 2005, and in a group show Rundlederwelten as part of the cultural festival for the World Cup 2006 at the Martin Gropius Bau museum Berlin. In 2011, their Blooming Britain project, a study of people who enter gardening competitions, toured RHS gardens around the UK, and was shown in 2014 at the Chelsea Flower Show. The Surrey Hills, an audio-visual piece about a landfill site, toured worldwide in 2012/3 as part of the exhibition Wild New Territories.

‘His knees hurt and the bank keep calling…. we have to run to keep up with his lagging behind, do more work, offer assistance, helping him help himself, caring and not turning backs… his friends are gone, the last man standing, the last man.! this platform offers him looking back at us, before he disappears into the dots that make up our computer screens, blur and move and break down’

‘James and the Machine’ extends the documentary work Moore creates in Working Men’s Clubs in London and offers collaborative methodologies via stages as tableaux. It has become a salvage ethnography, racing against rampant gentrification.

Recent research into vernacular design turned up this image of one particular archetype about to be put to use. As the fragment of text suggests, the man holding the milking stool and pail is Calvin Coolidge, U.S. President from 1923-29. I was reminded of Ad Reinhardt’s ruminations on the flexibility of image and metaphor when applied to political cartoons, and Coolidge’s presence seemed particularly appropriate given his reputation-defining relationship to labour unionisation, agriculture and his timely exit from political office. As an image it invites consideration of resources, infrastructure, relationships of power, labour and intent. The mark-ups come from a lecture on the same and, in recognition of this context, the specific modelling to be extrapolated from the ideogram should be adapted to fit. Like the working furniture of artisanal labourers, instructive metaphors may be constructed using the means at hand and informed by direct engagement with the context that presents itself.

Jessica Voorsanger was commissioned by Beacon Art Project in 2004 to make a work to be sited in the grounds of Tupholme Abbey the ruins of a 15th century monastery in Lincolnshire.

Voorsanger is an American artist living in London, having studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and Goldsmiths College (MA Fine Art). She has had one-person exhibitions in London, New York, Edinburgh, Berlin & Turin. She has recently completed projects for the ICA (London), Art on the Underground (Charing Cross Station, London) and The Whitechapel Art Gallery (London). She works in a variety of media ranging from painting, photography, sculpture, installation, mail art and performance. The projects themselves often dictate the medium that is most appropriate.

The work she makes explores the concept of celebrity within popular culture through obsession, fans and media representation. Until recently it has specifically dealt with the relationship between the “celebrity” and their “fans” and the ideology of fan culture. She attempts to capture the inaccessibility of celebrities as well as tries to relate the excitement that a fan can feel for a celebrity. (Who wants to admit to having loved someone for an eternity that they will never meet?) Now, with the overwhelming domination of reality TV, the concept of celebrity has changed. It is no longer connected only to people with talent but also of notoriety.

Following this new line of enquiry, she has been exploring the interchangeability of celebrities and their audience. In the photographic image she created for Sun-Screen, she is playing on the notion of the self publicised celebrity. Through social media, it is possible to have followings of a ‘fan base’ of thousands of people for doing no more than putting on your make-up. But this public engagement takes a lot of maintenance and upkeep, which is the work aspect. It is possible to incorporate the ‘work’ of social media in an leisurely way [having a cup of tea and cake with your feet up] – while still communicating with thousands of people.

The image created for Sunscreen involves a re-interpretation of representing a three-dimensional practice, reversing the assemblage of objects back to a two dimensional image. The materials of alabaster, brass and semi-precious stone, where shaped and assembled to create an image representative of a beacon, or buoy, in sight over an architectural vista. This beacon can represent the cities revenues morphing from commodity to culture, and in a way, echoing the project of Sunscreen; morphing physical artwork to an immaterial image.

Lotti is a current member of One Thoresby Street and currently lives and works in Nottingham, UK. She studied BA Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University graduating (2009) and MFA Sculpture at West Dean College, The Edward James Foundation, Sussex, between 2012 and 2014.

She works with an eclectic range of materials and processes on a variety of scales, with a playful and intuitive attitude to fabrication methods. Her work is focused on creating objects and arrangements with concentration on materiality, relationship, and the potential for character within the inanimate. Lotti has exhibited throughout the UK, including showing alongside international artists during the British Arts Show Sideshow in 2010 at Chapter Gallery in Cardiff. She was shortlisted for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2014 and has most recently won the SYSON Gallery Prize, in which she will be exhibiting her first solo show in May 2015. Lotti will be featured on Young Artists in Conversation later this year, a website dedicated as a platform and resource for literature on emerging artists in the UK.

I produce images; sometimes I feel I can’t translate the thoughts/images from the interior space of my mind out of myself into the physical world – because they are half vague, appearing unfinished in form. When I look and think of a thing I have made or a situation i’m in from time to time, I can’t help but feel an energy that prompts a sense of overwhelming change and movement, both internally in my perceptions and understanding, as well as in inanimate things outside of myself.

The scale model of my studio space partly signifies an inadequacy of me being able to reach a concrete state; perhaps because I spend too long in the actual space, which is wrapped up in the unfolding of ideas and practicing them.

Rebecca Ounstead is a current member of One Thoresby Street and lives and works in Nottingham. Rebecca graduated from Nottingham Trent University in 2012. Since graduating she has undertaken residencies both in the UK and Europe, been selected for multiple open shows such as: Exeter Phoenix and Nottingham Castle 2012 and 2013 as well as commissioned to produce new work for Bristol Art Weekender by Hand In Glove and Bloc Projects, Sheffield. In 2014 Rebecca was appointed Programmer for the Attic Gallery at One Thoresby Street, curating and programming a series of group shows, talks programme, social events, performances and residencies in order to further develop and explore her current concerns in: gender politics, capital, commodity, sexuality, display, experience, and interaction.

Recent shows include solo show, Tassels ’n’ That, Bloc Projects, Sheffield, No Grey Areas, Haha Gallery, Southampton and Hotel Maria Kapel, Amsterdam. Rebecca is currently developing new work in collaboration with Funktionlust for their upcoming EP launch and for FOAM, a touring project curated by Mat Jenner.

Lynn Fulton is concerned with an exploration of materials and situations, constructed or encountered. This forms an ongoing process of collecting, using and reusing materials and images. A central concern is ‘Site’, as in a place where something is happening, in process: an archaeological site, storage site, a place where things are being uncovered/discovered, memory, history, narrative, things that may be useful, stored for future use. Elements are brought together from different places in order to think about materiality and how the relationships between things can be put together under a different set of criteria.

Lynn is a current Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University BA Fine Art and member of One Thoresby Street.

A looping video of a woman using Malcolm’s Miracle Moisture Jamzz Moisturizing Goddess Gloves to wiggle her computer’s screensaver.

Shana Moulton recently completed an Artist Residency at Primary, Nottingham. She grew up near Yosemite, California, earned her BA from University of California, Berkeley in Art and Anthropology and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Over the past ten years she has been developing her ongoing video/performance series Whispering Pines, in which she plays the role of “Cynthia”, both a fictional figure and the artist’s alter ego. Moulton has had solo exhibitions or performances at The New Museum, SFMOMA, MoMA P.S.1, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Palais De Tokyo in Paris, The Migros Museum in Zurich and the Times Museum in Guangzhou. Moulton’s work has been reviewed in the Village Voice, Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, Artnet Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Art Review, Artpress and Flash Art. She is a featured artist at Electronic Arts Intermix and Art21 and teaches art at The Kunstakademie Münster.

Jonathan Baldock’s and Rafal Zajko’s shared interest in artifice and theatrical stages led them to collaborate on the piece made entirely for Sunscreen entitled “Pleasure Principle (boom boom pow)”. For the piece Zajko documented Baldock’s carefully hand-stitched sculptures, and began his trademark use of layering and editing image and sound in order to make an animation whereby Baldock’s sculpture’s pulsate and pump at the rate of a human heartbeat.

Taking the theme of this year’s Venice Biennale literally – “Pleasure Principle” depicts a pulsating sculpture beating at the rate of the human heart during the sexual climax. The piece aims to animate the inanimate computer through an anthropomorphic gesture staging a “living” sculpture on the screen.

The depiction of Baldock’s hand-crafted and very tactile soft sculptures playfully question the physicality of the virtual in an illusory way. Through the repetitive and hypnotic movement the screen-saver hopes to give the viewer a sensation of experiencing an encounter with the piece physically.

A recent move back to the city of Nottingham has highlighted many socio-economic changes that are occurring within many of Britain’s regional towns. One particular example being the second re-furbishment of the city’s major shopping arena. This one space which through its history has encapsulated all consumer activity possible (the original use for the site was a railway station, it also comprises flats and a hotel ) has subsequently and still is an ever changing hub of high street staples and continuous testing ground for brands pioneering a capital style gentrification within regional areas. Without placing judgement on it’s value, when transformation of such places occurs its mythologies can be bred, and in a purely psycho-geographical and hauntological sense this Sunscreen work plays directly with this sites original and possible future trans-morphism.

Blue Firth’s work focuses on encountering historical narratives, and how perception can be questioned through built environments and participatory events. What predominantly starts as a research based practice, manifests into staged physical forms, using illusionary patterns, bold graphics and abstracted recognisable motifs from popular culture. She has shown extensively throughout the UK and Europe, as well as having work in both public and private collections.

Recent exhibitions/commissions include, Same Old, Same Old, 2013, The Architecture Space, The Royal Academy of Arts, London, It Is Something Like Tomrorrow, 2012, Hatton Locks, The Canals and Rivers Trust & Grand Union, and There Goes the Neighbourhood, 2011, Copenhagen Place, London.

Firth has spoken publicly on themes including architecture, memory and counterculture, and broadcasts as half of Womens Hour a podcast celebrating women in music. She also designs and publishes artists books and artisan products as Pavilionary Press with designer Alex Crispin.

Blue Firth studied at the Royal Academy of Arts (2012). She was born and currently lives and works in Nottingham. She has exhibited extensively with One Thoresby Street, Syson, and Moot galleries since 2005.

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Resides in Lincoln, UK and were selected as B.mentored artists as part of Beacon’s B.professional programme presenting their work at a B.talking event in October 2014 and January 2015 respectively.